Lizzy McAlpine - five seconds flat

"five seconds flat" is the most perfect album I've heard in a good while. If that sounds like an overstatement, it isn't really. Lizzy McAlpine knows how to write one hell of a song, and the production provides a meticulous background to her narratives and melodies. The songs never sit still, and sometimes evolve so smoothly that you barely miss where one shifts from understated to exhilarated. It's almost too perfect, if that's even possible: this is an emotionally sprawling but astonishingly focused body of work from a singer who's in total command of her craft and who deserves more buzz than she's currently getting. If she doesn't score a hit in the next two years, I'll be surprised.